George Vaz breaks down the concept of representative design in coaching — the idea that practice environments should mirror real game demands for true skill transfer.
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In this episode, George Vaz breaks down the concept of representative design in coaching — the idea that practice environments should mirror real game demands for true skill transfer. Drawing on ecological dynamics and research-backed insights, George explores how coaches can create more game-realistic drills, use task simplification over decomposition, and balance traditional and constraints-led approaches.
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This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball. Within this podcast, we unpack how an ecological dynamics framework impacts our perspective of the game.
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Welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. On today's episode, I want to talk about representative design and coaching. So recently, a coach in our monthly membership Q&A inside the Transforming Basketball community asked a question for Alex, which was, why can't traditional methods coexist with CLA methods?
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George is joined by João Pacheco, a coach from Portugal who has been living and coaching in Germany for nearly 14 years.
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And this is a question we get a lot at Transforming Basketball. And in this episode, I aim to answer this question as well as layer in some of Alex's response to this question within this episode. Okay, so we're going to talk about representative learning design, which is the idea that practice should reflect the demands of the game if we want transfer to happen.
So we'll break down what this means, why it matters, and how to simplify practice activities and not decontextualize or decompose practice activities. So firstly, what does representative design mean? So this is where coaches design activities that keep perception-action coupled. So we act to perceive and we perceive to act.
The key question to ask when designing activities is, is there a decision involved? So in non-representative practices, drills where the ball, defender, or decisions are missing, they drop a false learning idea. If the context doesn't look like the game, players might get good at the drill, but not good at the game.
And it's like spot shooting, you know, a player will, or free throws even, a player will knock down free throws or shots from the same spot, but when they get in the game, they freeze. They just don't know. That's because there's a contest coming from the side.
It's a bad pass, time to score, there's pressure, fatigue. So all of that is involved within the game. So why this matters? Representative practice ensures players perceive and act in ways that match competition. If practice strips away information, so if there's no defender, no decision, no time pressure, players don't get attuned to the signals that really matter.
Still, the research 50 years ago shows how inefficient it is to do block things. It's just very simple. And interestingly enough, a lot of the research being done now in CLA is they're doing kind of control groups where they actually do the tests on blocked drills in different sports.
So, what they often do is they have, you know, the, like, the basketball equivalent would be like shooting 1-on-0 from different spots, doing layups 1-on-0. But then what they do is control groups where they'd have like a CLA group and a traditional group.
And what's really funny is that the CLA group still performs better at the traditional tests than the group preparing for the tests with blocked practice.
So in the research paper, Sampling Perception-Action Couplings from Competition Create Representative Basketball Shooting Tasks: A Replication and Extension of Gorman and Maloney, the author quotes, shooting accuracy in the defendant condition showed a high correlation to the shooting accuracy exhibited in competitions. And sampling key performance constraints to create defended situations may encourage a more adaptable technique, resulting in greater skill transfer from training to in-game performance.
End quote. So this all goes back to the fact that we perceive to act and act to perceive. And it's great. Drills look great. It's neat. It's tidy. You know, a parent or someone with limited knowledge of basketball coaching can walk in the gym.
And they see what's going on, and players are in a line, and they're doing what they're supposed to, and it looks really good. There's a high success rate. But this doesn't really match the demands of the game. We know the game is messy, it's chaotic, and so this practice environment fails to replicate the chaos that exists in the game.
Moves, when we see them, techniques, they emerge because there's a a problem the player is trying to solve. So if we remove that problem, then there's simply no context for what does emerge next. So again, this comes back to the research, perception-action coupling, et cetera.
And when players just do the action, which is a taught move, the transfer is not there because they're not learning to pick up the key information in the environment that shapes why that movement could be a possible solution.
And from a further research paper, insights from ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory can underpin a philosophy of coaching. For an individual to engage effectively with other individuals, events, services, and objects in his or her performance environment, he or she needs to detect the key affordances within that location.
So all that means is there needs to be— the practice has to look like the game if we want players to improve in the game context. Making practice look like the game— what can we do as coaches to do this? Well, firstly, I think maybe another question we get a lot is when coaches say, my players are not skilled enough to play live yet, what can I do?
So we use task simplification instead of task decomposition. And decomposition means breaking skills down into isolated parts. So passing with no defender, No decision. Simplification means keeping the game context intact, but adjusting constraints so you can give the advantage to the offense or a disadvantage to the defense.
So in a passing game, it can simply be defense can't steal the ball. They can only play guided defense with their hands, right? So it's very simple, but it gives the offense a decision to make before the pass is made. And And players can perceive and act like they would in real games until eventually you can say, okay, you're actually trying to steal the ball in this 2-on-1 passing game.
So not every game will be 100% representative of a real game. So it's not like we need to only, if we want players to improve in a 5-on-5 setting, we only put them in 5-on-5 in practice. That's not the case. So this is where the representative dial comes in.
So imagine a dial from a scale of 1 to 10. 1 being the lowest of representativeness and 10 being the most. So let's look at this from 1 to 10 together. So 1 could be training with frogs. So there's no decisions, it's not representative, or it's very— as far away from the game as we can get, right?
And then you go up the dial. So 2 could be mosquito shooting. So this is where a player is dribbling in space, a defense is going around them, and they can't block the shot. They can only try to be super annoying like a mosquito.
3 can be something like dribble gauntlet. You might have seen this in our membership website, and it's basically where there's 3 defenders in 3 zones in the full court, and one player has to try and get to the opposite sideline or the opposite basket to score, going through those, going through the gauntlet.
4 could be chameleon one-on-one. You start with the ball in the back, and it's a one-on-one advantage for the offense. 5 could be one-on-one plus one blast cut start, where the plus one is a passer. And the 1-on-1 starts from the single gap or racing from a double gap to a single gap.
Okay. And then as you, and then 6 could be half-court bursts, 3-on-2. So as you look more, so as the representativeness increases on the dial, so too does the amount of players in the game. Right. And this is because we don't want to overload the working memory capacity of the players while we're teaching them something new.
So again, 7 could be 3 trips, 4-on-3. So great transition game. If you haven't tried it, give it a try. 8 could be 4-on-4-on-4 defensive shutdown, something, you know, very popular with coaches everywhere. I'm sure you would have tried it in your practice environments.
And then 9 could be something like 3 lives, 5-on-5, where you're trying to work on a specific principle of play. And if the players don't do it, they lose a life. If they lose all 3 lives, they lose before getting to the score.
the final score. And then finally, 10, the most representative, is the game itself. So practical tweaks coaches can use in their practice environments. So before I do share these practical tweaks, I want to share one last excerpt from Alex's Q&A. A question I am likely to hear more next season in a coach mentor role is, why can't the CLA and traditional technique training coexist?
How are you responding to questions like this?
That's a really good question. So go through it a lot. I would start with this. It's, do you believe that movement and skills emerge through self-organization or through players having like a library in their brain, an archive system, Where they pull out different techniques at the right time, decide on appropriate response, bring it out and do it right.
Now, if you believe in self-organization and the body moving, you know, freely responding to the interaction of constraints, skills emerging as opposed to being like internal things, then you would never see a need to teach technique or drills because Because it's just incompatible with self-organization.
Now, if you really believe that players or athletes are like seeing things, they have time to decide on a motor movement, and then they bring it out and do it, then fine, do drills. But it's like, if this is why it's so important to have that theory and be well informed by, by human movement, and because obviously I believe in self-organization, I wouldn't need to see a value to using a drill because all I'm doing is disrupting self-organization by suggesting to the player there's one way of doing it, there's a better way of doing it,
and I don't really know what it, what it's like to be inside their body. And for me, it would be I'd rather create the environment and let them self-organize versus saying this is the one way I want you to do it and then being very restrictive and them not even being able to do that when it comes to the game.
So how can coaches ensure they are creating representative learning environments? We spoke about this at the beginning, but one way is to always include a decision. So instead of passing back and forth, add a defender. It's as simple as that. And you can make the defense guided, or you can let them play live.
And it could be as simple as if you deflect the ball, or if you touch the player that has the ball, you switch out. Another thing you can do Is layer in defenders gradually. So we have guided, scripted, and live defense that you can use.
So guided means the defense is giving the decision, but the defense is not at full speed. So maybe dummy defense, token defense, I've heard it referred to before. This works well if you give the defense an ABC list of options. So if it's a 1-on-1 closeout game, A could be a hot closeout, B could be a normal closeout, and C is a cold closeout.
And the defense will get these in random order every time. Scripted defense, offense knows what the defense will do, but it is live. So this is so the offense can work on specific movements, specific solutions. It could be, you know, whatever, coverage solution, or maybe attacking one-on-one.
And then finally, live. This is just live defense, and it allows your players to adapt in game-specific environments. Another thing you can do is combine the 4 phases of the game. So for example, if you're doing a half-court game with intention on half-court offense, you can add a defensive transition sequence to the game to finish the game, as opposed to just finishing it on the rebound, the rep restarts.
You could keep it going and players have to get to the— they have to defend up into the half court or up into the opposite basket. Another thing you could do to make your practices more representative of the game is introduce consequences to small-sided games.
So for a half-court game, you can give the defense 2 points for every live ball turnover. As this may lead to a greater transition opportunity for the— for if the offense turns the ball over. So, or something else you can do is seal every game, every small-sided game in practice with 1 or 2 free throws.
So if a team wins, they have to shoot the 1 or 2 free throws. And this way players can work on their free throws in a more game-representative manner because it's— there's pressure. So if they miss the free throws, there's consequences. Another thing is vary starting positions.
So The small-sided game can start from a different location every rep, and it could be as simple as that. So it could even start from maybe a different— going back to the 4 phases of the game, it could start from a rebound or start from sideline out of bounds.
So you can be very creative with how you start your small-sided game as opposed to starting it from the same position every time, which just doesn't really happen in the game unless it is a sideline out of bounds or baseline out of bounds.
And then another thing lastly is you can couple skills to context. So instead of isolated shooting, you can add a light contest and add in movements that would happen before the shot. So for example, if you have a player that comes off a screen away for the shot, then you can just have him doing that movement and then have a defense, a defender coming in with a light contest or maybe even a real contest, you know, going back to the guided, scripted, and live defense.
So to wrap up, can traditional methods coexist with CLA methods? It all comes back to, do you believe skills and movements emerge through self-organization, or do you believe that players are seeing things, they have time to decide on the motor movement? So what matters is the theory guiding your practice environment and ultimately the belief in how you think skills emerge.
Representative design is a key lens that keeps your practice honest to the game. So now I do want to invite coaches that are listening to audit one of your own drills this week and ask, does this look like the game? If not, how can I tweak it so it can be more representative of the game?
As always, thank you for listening.
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